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Prior studies have mainly attributed customer incivility to dispositional characteristics, whereas little attention has been paid to exploring service employees' role in triggering or reducing customer incivility. The purpose of the present study is to propose and test a model in which service employees' emotional labor strategies affect customer incivility via influencing customers' self-esteem threat, as well as examine the moderating role of customer's perception of service climate.

Based on a matched sample consisting of 317 employee-customer dyads in China, multiple regression analysis and indirect effect tests were employed to test our model.

The study shows that employee surface acting is positively related to customer incivility, whereas deep acting is negatively associated with customer incivility. Moreover, customer self-esteem threat mediates the relationship between both types of emotional labor and customer incivility. Customer perception of service climate moderates the relationship between deep acting and customer self-esteem threat.

The current research broadens the antecedents of customer incivility from the employee perspective and sheds more light on the role of customer self-esteem in the interactions between employees and customers. It also demonstrates a complementary relationship between service climate and individual employees' emotional labor strategies, thereby expanding the existing understanding of the management of employees' emotional labor.

Using equity theory, this study aims to examine the role of customer incivility in effecting service sabotage among hotel employees by recognizing the mediating role of revenge motivation and the moderating effect of emotion regulation.

A multi-wave, multi-source questionnaire survey was conducted with 291 employee–supervisor dyads at chain hotels in Shenzhen, China. Previously developed and validated measures for customer incivility, revenge motivation, emotion regulation and service sabotage were adopted to test the hypotheses.

Customer incivility increased employees’ revenge motivation and service sabotage. Emotion regulation acted as a boundary condition for customer incivility’s direct effect on revenge motivation and its indirect effect on service sabotage through revenge motivation. Cognitive reappraisal mitigated the detrimental influence of customer incivility, whereas expressive suppression worsened its adverse effects.

Managers should monitor and deter the emergence of uncivil behaviors, provide psychological support for employees experiencing customer incivility and encourage these employees to use cognitive reappraisal rather than expressive suppression as an emotion regulation strategy.

To the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has investigated the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship in the hotel industry. This study sheds light on how customer incivility can motivate service sabotage among hotel employees. Furthermore, the authors used equity theory rather than the commonly adopted resources perspective to offer new insights into the customer incivility–service sabotage relationship.

The domain of digital service not only includes digital service products made available for purchase but also the provision of digital customer service, such as customers seeking support on brands' social media channels. This type of digital customer service introduces new challenges not found in offline service recovery situations. This research highlights one such occurrence by investigating customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions during digital service recovery. In particular, dysfunctional dialog, such as online incivility (e.g. rude and insulting comments), directed at a complainant by a fellow customer is investigated.

Survey data from an online panel are utilized to test the hypothesized relationships between dysfunctional customer behavior (i.e. online incivility), C2C interactional justice, customer perceived service climate and three forms of experiential value using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results show that customer perceptions of the firm's service climate are negatively affected by online incivility but only when such incivility produces C2C injustice. This outcome is notable due to the strong relationship found between customer perceived service climate and the following three forms of online experiential value: sociability, hedonic and pragmatic value. Thus, a weakened service climate subsequently leads to weakened experiential value for complainants.

The theoretical implications of two nascent constructs, C2C interactional justice and customer perceived service climate, are further developed with reference to digital customer service situations. In particular, given that prior research has focused on customer perceptions of service climate in core consumption situations of enjoyable face-to-face service experiences, it has only considered optimal or extremely positive service climate assessments in non-digital contexts. This study expands the understanding of the customer perceived service climate construct by examining the implications of a sub-optimal service climate in a digital customer service situation of an unenjoyable service experience. The limitations include a small sample size, the use of hypothetical scenarios and a failure situation limited to a single industry.

Managers who oversee social media channels or online communities must be prepared to act upon C2C online incivility. Deeming such communications as innocent online chatter not worthy of company intervention is a mistake, as the results of this study show that such inaction may lead to negative customer perceptions of the digital service environment and harm the customer experience.

This work develops a greater understanding of the importance of C2C interactional justice and customer perceived service climate in online customer service situations that prior research has yet to establish. In particular, previous studies have not investigated the negative effects of a situation that produces sub-optimal customer perceptions of a service climate.

Although studies have emphasized the need to explore the negative consequences of customer incivility, scant attention has been paid to positive factors that can mitigate its negative effects on employees’ service performance. The purpose of this study is to extend research on customer incivility and its association with rapport and tipping through the prism of conservation of resources theory. It also examines the role of agreeableness as a personal resource in coping with instances of incivility.

A total of 502 Israeli restaurant servers took part in this study.

Agreeableness significantly moderated the relationship between customer incivility and rapport: agreeable hospitality employees who served customers manifesting low/medium incivility reported better rapport than disagreeable hospitality employees. However, this effect was not significant for high incivility. Further, agreeable hospitality employees who served customers with low/medium incivility reported higher tips than disagreeable hospitality employees. Surprisingly, the findings also suggested that when employees served customers exhibiting high incivility, the tips were lower for servers high on agreeableness than for servers low on agreeableness.

This study broadens the frontiers of research on customer incivility and provides insights into the critical financial and emotional costs hospitality employees and service organizations incur when encountering incivility. The findings also contribute to the scant research on the potential moderators that may enable employees to handle customer interactions more constructively in the case of incivility within the hospitality industry. Agreeableness appeared to alleviate the negative effects of customer incivility on rapport and tipping but only seemed to be an effective resource up to a certain level of customer incivility.

This empirical study explored how coworker incivility and customer incivility affect the work engagement and job performance of frontline employees.

To investigate the incivility and characteristics of hospitality industry workplaces, this study recruited frontline employees from tourist hotels as study participants. Because complete contact information could not be obtained for this population, convenience sampling was employed. A structured questionnaire was used for data collection.

Coworker incivility and customer incivility reduced work engagement and job performance. The effects of coworker incivility on the work engagement and job performance are greater than those of customer incivility. Furthermore, work engagement has a positive effect on the job performance.

Although studies have investigated the effects of customer incivility, these effects have not been compared with those of coworker incivility. Moreover, studies on the influence of coworker and customer incivility on job performance and work engagement in the hospitality industry and on those of work engagement on job performance have been scant. The current empirical study investigated the effects of coworker and customer incivility on the job performance and work engagement and of frontline hospitality employees.

On the basis of person–job fit theory and conservation of resource theory, this study aims to develop and test a model to examine the impact of polychronicity on frontline employees’ job performance in hotel industry and simultaneously, investigate the moderating effects of supervisor, coworker and customer incivility as stressors in the relationship between polychronicity and employees’ job performance.

Data are obtained in North Cyprus from 262 frontline employees working in four- and five-star hotels.

The results suggest that polychronicity refers to employees’ performance. Customer incivility negatively and significantly influences job performance, but coworker and supervisor incivilities do not. Unlike coworker incivility, both customer and supervisor incivilities moderate the relationship between polychronicity and job performance; that is, high customer and/or supervisor incivility weaken the positive relationship between polychronicity and job performance.

Regarding the critical role of polychronic frontline employees, hotel management should recruit the right candidates and endeavor to retain such employees by offering monetary and non-monetary incentives, training and empowering. They may implement a zero-tolerance policy that simultaneously supports both parties (customers and employees).

The association between employee quality (i.e. polychronicity), job performance and incivility is often overlooked in the hospitality research. This study is the first attempt to consider the joint moderating effect of important social stressors (customer, coworker and supervisor incivility) in the hotel industry.

This study aims to examine how workplace incivility (i.e. coworker and customer incivility) affects service employees’ creativity, specifically the way emotional exhaustion at work decreases their intrinsic motivation, and, in turn, damages service employees’ creativity. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to show the mechanism by which both coworker and customer incivility at work affects service employee creativity.

Service employees from a hotel in South Korea were surveyed using a self-administered instrument for data collection. Out of 450 questionnaires, a total of 281 usable questionnaires were obtained after list-wise deletion, for a 62.4 per cent response rate. Structural equation modeling analysis provided support for the hypotheses.

The results indicate a serial multiple mediator model in which both coworker and customer incivility increase service employees’ emotional exhaustion, which, in turn, reduces their intrinsic motivation at work and ultimately decreases their creativity. That is, the findings of this study reveal a negative relationship between workplace incivility (i.e. coworker and customer incivility) and service employees’ creativity that is fully and sequentially mediated by the service employees’ emotional exhaustion and intrinsic motivation.

The use of cross-sectional self-reports potentially raises concerns about common method bias. Caution is recommended in reaching conclusions concerning the causal relationships between the variables, as the current study did not capture causality variation. For instance, it may be that emotional exhaustion from incivility gradually compounds over time, leading to a greater negative impact on service employees. In contrast, employees may develop strategies to cope with uncivil behavior over time, which attenuates the negative effects on service employees as time passes. A longitudinal design might offer an alternative to overcome this limitation in future research.

Considering the findings about the mediating effect of emotional exhaustion between workplace incivility and employee outcomes (i.e. intrinsic motivation and creativity), firms should consider establishing systematic institutional practices and policies to prevent employees from feeling emotionally exhausted from workplace incivility. Executive and senior management teams would benefit by instituting strict policies and regulations which nurture desirable behaviors among organizational members that protect victims of workplace incivility.

This study is the first to examine the relationship between workplace incivility and creativity. Moreover, the present study attempts to develop an understanding of the underlying mechanism through which both coworker and customer incivility negatively affect service employees’ creativity.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating role customer orientation plays in the relationship between service employees’ personality and their perceived experiences of customer incivility.

Service workers from a variety of industries were recruited from an online panel service and asked to complete a self-report on-line questionnaire (n = 253). PLS structural equation modeling was used to test the research hypotheses.

Service employees who are high in agreeableness and core self-evaluations are more customer-oriented and, as a result, report fewer customer incivility experiences. Disagreeable and neurotic service employees are more likely to be selling-orientated, but this was unrelated to customer incivility.

The results are limited because all data are self-report. However, the findings suggest that personality and customer orientation influence employees’ customer incivility experiences.

Service jobs can be stressful, in part, because employees have to deal with rude and abusive customers. However, little is known about the antecedents to customer incivility from the perspective of the service provider. The present study bridges this gap and provides an understanding of the mechanisms by which targeted employees’ personality characteristics and customer-oriented behaviors influence their experiences of customer incivility. The results suggest two possible pathways to reduce employees’ customer incivility experiences including selection and training activities to develop a high core self-evaluation and more customer-oriented behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how customer incivility affects service employees’ emotional labor (i.e. surface acting) and the way surface acting augments their emotional exhaustion at work, and in turn, damages customer orientations of service employees.

Using a sample of 309 department store sales employees in South Korea, a two-stage mediation model is used in terms of structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that customer incivility is positively related to service employees’ use of surface acting; this, in turn, results in feelings of emotional exhaustion, which are negatively related to their customer orientation. That is, the findings of this study shows that the negative relationship between customer incivility and service employees’ customer orientation was fully and sequentially mediated by service employees’ surface acting and emotional exhaustion.

The main limitation is the nature of the cross-sectional data the authors used in the analysis. It gives us reason to be very cautious in reaching conclusions concerning causal relationships among variables, since the authors did not capture longitudinal variation.

The research shows that customer incivility has a negative effect on service employees’ customer-oriented behaviors since experiences of customer incivility among emotionally exhausted employees via surface acting generates inadequate and unfair sense-making related to the treatment offered by customers, which increases the tendency of decreasing their effort and loyalty for customers to prevent further loss of emotional resources. Therefore, service organizations should devise appropriate strategies and implement systematic programs for reducing employee exposure to customer incivility, or preventing it altogether.

The current study broadens the conceptual work and empirical studies in customer incivility literature by representing a fundamental mechanism of why customer incivility negatively affects service employees’ customer orientation. The primary contribution of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of how customer incivility leads to lower employee customer-oriented behaviors through double mediating effects of surface acting and emotional exhaustion.

This paper aims to study how the negative spiral of incivility from customers to employees happens by measuring the mediating effect of employees’ burnout. Moreover, it investigates how to mitigate the detrimental influences of customer incivility by assessing the moderating effect of employees’ emotional intelligence.

A cross-sectional questionnaire survey using MTurk was conducted, targeting full-service restaurant employees. Descriptive statistic, confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and hierarchical multiple regression analysis were applied.

The results presented that there is a direct relationship between customer incivility and employee incivility toward customers and coworkers. Additionally, employees’ burnout significantly mediates the relationship between customer incivility and employee incivility. Moreover, it presented the significant moderating effect of employees’ emotional intelligence on the relationship between customer incivility and employee incivility.

Experiences of customer incivility during a service encounter directly trigger employee incivility. Moreover, customer incivility indirectly leads to employee incivility by increasing employees’ burnout. In addition, employees’ emotional intelligence mitigates a negative spiral of incivility from customers to employees. However, this study has limitations that provide suggestions for future research.

This research shows how customer incivility causes employee incivility in the workplace. It also shows a significant moderating role of employees’ emotional intelligence to mitigate the influence of customer incivility on employee incivility.